"This won't take long," Margot had said.
That was forty-three minutes ago. Sloane Wyndham had counted.
She stood between two bowing shelves in the Barnett Street Book Depot - which was a very ambitious name for what amounted to a former garage with shelves and aspirations - and did a slow, methodical count of the ceiling tiles. Thirty-seven. She'd checked twice. The ceiling was the most interesting thing she'd encountered in the past forty minutes, and that was a genuinely damning statement about the alternatives.
The store had one window, up front, throwing a narrow column of afternoon light across the nearest stacks. It had one ceiling fan, directly above her head, turning in slow, exhausted circles that clicked softly on every fourth revolution. It had books: on shelves, in front of shelves, in stacked columns on a folding card table near the door, in piles that had probably made sense to someone at some point and no longer did. Old paperbacks, encyclopedias with split spines, hardcovers with their jackets long gone. The smell was specific - old paper, settled dust, and something faintly sweet underneath it all, the smell of things that had been kept a long time.
Sloane had been to antique shops. She'd been to estate sales with her mother. She understood, in the abstract, the particular appeal of spaces that held other people's history. She even appreciated it.
In the abstract, those spaces had also had working air conditioning.
She pulled out her phone. One bar of signal, which turned out to be aspirational rather than functional.
[Cole. You owe me. This is actual manual labor.]
Sending failed.
She tried again.
Sending failed.
She put her phone away.
"Margot." She aimed for pleasant. She landed somewhere between pleasant and patient. "Margot, I need verbal confirmation that you're still alive."
From somewhere deep in the back stacks: a soft, delighted sound. Not words. Just the particular noise Margot Ellery made when she found something she wanted - breathless, satisfied, completely absorbed. Utterly useless for Sloane's purposes.
She leaned against the nearest shelf, carefully, and looked at the ceiling fan.
Click.
She was here because Margot had asked her to be. That was the entire, complete, singular reason. Margot was one of three people in the world who could make a request that Sloane would not find a polite way around, and Margot had called two weeks ago with that particular voice of hers - half question, half foregone conclusion - and said: "You'll come with me to this bookstore on Saturday, right? I need someone with a car and I need company and I might need someone to carry things."
"I'm terrible at carrying things," Sloane had said.
"You're perfectly capable. You just choose not to."
"That's not fair."
"It's completely fair. Saturday, noon. I'll send you the address."
And here Sloane was. Saturday noon, which had become Saturday one-forty-three because Margot had disappeared into the stacks around row six and had not emerged since, and the air in this store was doing something slow and suffocating, and Sloane's blowout had been wilting for the past twenty minutes, and her phone had one bar for show.
She loved Margot absolutely. She was still bored and hot and getting more of both.
She pushed off the shelf and decided to do something useful with herself. She would explore. She would treat this as an expedition. She was twenty-four years old and she was capable of finding something interesting anywhere she happened to be - she'd been bored in ballrooms and interested in hardware stores and she would simply apply that principle now.
She walked to the back section.
The academic texts were in the back, where the light dropped off and the shelves stood close enough together that she had to turn sideways. Her shoulder brushed a row of chemistry books and a thin paperback toppled; she caught it, replaced it carefully, and moved on.
She had no particular use for academic texts. She had a communications degree from Fairview and a vague recollection of one science lecture course - environmental policy, eight a.m., attended roughly sixty percent of the time - and she had not thought rigorously about the hard sciences since. Possibly ever.
Which was perhaps why, when her eye caught the spine of a thin, emerald-green book labeled SPECTROSCOPY: PRINCIPLES AND APPLICATIONS, FOURTH EDITION, she stopped and looked at it.
She didn't know what spectroscopy was. That was the honest truth. It sounded like something that mattered if you were a certain kind of person - the kind who thought carefully about wavelengths and frequencies and invisible forces. She was not that kind of person. But the word had a sound to it that she liked, and the book was small and specific, wedged between two enormous chemistry hardcovers, and there was something about it that seemed worth looking at.
She reached for it.
The book didn't move.
She adjusted her grip and tried again. The chemistry textbooks on either side had apparently formed an allegiance. The Spectroscopy book gave about half an inch and stopped.
Fine. She braced her other hand against the shelf and pulled with actual intention.
The shelf shuddered. That was her first warning. She missed it entirely.
Her second warning was the soft, cascading sound above her head - the kind of sound that is, in retrospect, extremely obvious, but which in the moment registers as something distant and not immediately concerning. She looked up.
The books stacked on top of the shelf - a disorganized pile of paperbacks and hardcovers and what were clearly three phone directories from somewhere around 1997 - were tilting forward.
She had exactly one second to register this information before they came down.